WARNING: this is an opinion piece. I will try to present facts, but I’m not an unbiased news source.

Oh boy. Whether you are rooting for the guy who got Clint Eastwood to babble to an empty chair (Mitt Romney), or the guy who is tap dancing as fast as he can in the White House to the “be patient. hope is on the way” song (President Barack Obama), you know this is a critical crossroad in our country’s history. The ideologies of the two main political parties have gotten so strange that by 50-year-old standards Obama would be considered conservative and Romney wouldn’t be taken seriously at all.

I was always a Hillary gal, but in 2008, I rallied behind the man of hope and was surprisingly inspired when he indeed took office. The country was hitting some harsh realities and the mere whiff of hope and change created a magical sense that we could suck it up and go through our growing pains and band together to become a stronger nation again. Lots of airy rhetoric and it worked . . . for like 5 minutes. Then the backlash of opposition turned the beltway into crazy town with all kinds of crazy talk about demolishing access to women’s healthcare; getting rid of the EPA; and giving personal rights to corporations. Ok. I’m probably exaggerating on these things, but that’s how it felt.

The Tea Party faction became cement in the intestines of our federal government to the point of painful and dangerous legislative constipation. Seems to me it is a miracle ANYTHING happened these last 3.5 years!

Obama proved to be less effective at Presidential governing than he was at campaigning. Most liberals feel that he compromised too much; the conservatives never enough. It’s been a tenuous and rough go for Obama’s first term (and possibly only) inthe oval office.

While lacking luster, did his policies keep us from going deeper into economic disaster? Hard to tell, but I’ve been trying to pay attention to his policies regarding the environment, energy and agriculture (GMOs specifically). He’s got a bit of a track-record regarding these things, where Romney has none. Although if you look to the RNC platform, it is easy to see where Romney draws his environmental and energy planks from.

In my opinion, as a Green Diva, Obama has better environmental and energy plans than Romney overall (and as I stated earlier somewhat of a track-record). It’s an imperfect plan that involves steps towards energy independence via homeland/offshore drilling and tapping into natural gas reserves presumably via fracking. This concerned me deeply and I decided to run a GD poll on the GD Facebook page. Here’s what we got so far (please feel free to weigh in!):